hardcore overclocking is super simple at least that's what I thought a couple
days ago unfortunately I am not an electrical engineer and we do not have a
full-blown Electronics lab so we have ended up with this mess RTX 390 all the
safeties disabled and a hijacked voltage controller that has what uh one two 12
ways it can die at any second I'm going to show you how to do all of these mods
and while it might look very janky this could be the fastest GPU in Canada and
this madness is is brought to you by seic Mother we're going to be using
their 1300 W power supply and if it can survive this th000 WT RTX 390 you're
going to be
fine here's the plan to get a GPU to go
really fast you need current and voltage
getting enough current is quite difficult NVIDIA has very tight limits
on how much current a card will draw for safety reason preventing us from having
too much fun we'll need to trick it into thinking it is drawing less current than
it actually is using a shunt mod we'll show you that in a minute voltage is
also tough for the last couple of generations NVIDIA hasn't given the
user's voltage control but we will be getting it back using this it is a neat
little device that allows us to bypass NVIDIA and talk directly to the voltage
control so we can tell it to give the GPU as much voltage as we want before we
can get get to that though we need to take some baseline readings to compare a
moded performance to so just running 3D Mark for all of our tests and should be
noted this GPU isn't exactly stock it was repasted with conducto knut and also
has K5 Pro as the thermal pads that gave us about 6% increase over stock so we're
already going to have pretty high scores just Baseline so our Baseline score is
10,411 and during that the GPU drew a maximum of 390 Watts once this thing's
overclocked it's going to be brutal on this power supply I'm going to run the
Benchmark once more so we can get an actual score that we can upload then the
madness begins normally removing the cooler of a GPU is the easy part of a
hard mod although today oh God it is not
cuz unfortunately I absolutely cak this thing with K5 Pro the plan was to just
never open this thing again and it would just be a fast GPU but here we are all
of this needs to leave because unfortunately soldering Toc Pro is not
going to be a good time oh I don't think that's a soap and water
kind of business yeah big regrets to up
the current available on our GPU we have two options a BIOS mod or a shunt mod if
you don't have access to an Electronics rework station a BIOS mod is probably
your best bet no need to trick the controllers to allow 1,000 wats of power
if your BIOS just accepts it but not everyone can use this approach for cards
that aren't regularly used by overclockers a BIOS mod probably just
doesn't exist and if it does exist good
luck finding it modable overclocking bioses have to originate from NVIDIA so
it is risky for the authorized person to Post online for just anyone to take if
you want one for your card just try asking around on some overclocking
forums or Discord servers one might end up in your DMs but even with a thousand
W BIOS you might run into sneaky current limits that's why today we're going to
be increasing the current the Hands-On way a shunt mod shunts are very simple
circuits allow a device to find out how much current is being drawn by measuring
the voltage drop across the shunt resistor the controller calculates the
current using Ohm's law so current equals voltage over top of resistance by
putting another resistor in parallel with the shunt resistor we can drop the
resistance and make the controller thinking is using less current than it
actually is in our case we're going to be soldering a 5m ohm resistor on top of
the existing 5 mohm resistors meaning in
software the GPU power that is reported will be half of what is actually drawing
there is a second method by placing liquid metal on top of the shunt
resistors you can effectively increase your current limit but it is difficult
to control makes your power readings just completely unreliable can kill your
GPU if it spills and as a bonus it'll eat away at the solder joints I didn't
want to deal with any of that so we are sticking dis soldering how much trouble
do we get into if we kill a 390 what did you guys do to this poor bit it's got
like Goole over it shame man I'm using
it I know what happened to that that's dead resistant juice on there man look
how much solder is in the in the in
the got to clean your tips it's a tech
tip right there do we have solder wire here not dog poop stuff you don't want
to just cover it in flux uh no I'm good
it's probably not going to work anyway so doesn't really matter what oh wow okay yeah it seems too high
uh yeah yeah for sure how do you go down this is a lot of inspiring confidence
that we know what we're doing a got it no you have to hold that and enter 69 I
guess all right I'm going to get proper wire you have you have the resistors
right there we go yeah boy that's why
you guys r in it like 800° C is cuz it just doesn't have enough heat yep FL uh
no no uh oh what have I done to that resistor I
am so sorry while you went to get the flux I figured out that we G done goofed
these three shunts yeah are the ones that are connected to the ground pins so
good thing that we had to go get flux because that would have been
fun send it a
b oh it's making bubbly noises why just
sticking oh woohoo it's such a bad Sol Di Alex this
isn't too bad of a soldering iron Kyle's just complaining a lot is this on it
is dude it's on I'm not joking why is it
so crap yeah so the soldering iron is at
Max like 220° oh that's like 15° lower
than what it needs like actually freaking mold the solder
off die okay so I'm not an angry
person typically I just like to shout at
things watching a derow video you might think that shunt mods are super easy I
certainly was fooled the problem is that our 70 W hako soldering iron really
wasn't designed for something like this NVIDIA did a great job designing this
PCB to dissipate heat which means unfortunately our 70 W soldering iron
just cannot heat it up enough there are a couple of ways around this first you
can buy a bettering soldering iron and get the results we saw from debower
alternately you can heat up the GPU so stick it in a toaster oven you never
plan on using again you could set it on bake setting and set the bake
temperature to like 75 or 100 bake it until the whole PCB reaches around 100°
C and then you can start soldering or you can put the GPU on top of a toaster
in the end we used option three chucking our largest tip on the end of our
soldering iron for maximum thermal mass and just setting the temperature to 900°
that gave us an instant of flowing so and a bunch of boiling flux it looks
terrible with the current limits doubled the next thing we need to do is gain
control of the core voltage unfortunately since Kepler NVIDIA hasn't
given the user voltage control to ensure our GTX customers get the highest
quality product that runs quiet cool and fits in their PC oh and if one of their
Partners like MSI or ASUS gives the user that control the car can't be sold with
a warranty NVIDIA controls the creation of GPU bioses to like absurd level as
far as I know like the way it works is you log into like an NVIDIA server make
your BIOS then you have to get permission from them to like actually
get the file fortunately we do have a solution for this where is our solution
for this oh here it is we have this the
Elmer Labs enhanced voltage controller or EVC 2sx it works by connecting to the
i2c bus a communication bus that allows all the different components of your GPU
to talk to each other to keep everything running nice and smoothly and the EVC
uses that bus to talk directly to the voltage controller most high-end gpus
these days use digital voltage controllers but before you get an EVC
make sure your GPU is compatible on most gpus there will be open i2c solder pads
that were used for debugging during production simply solder a header onto
one of those and you can use the EVC once connected to the GPU we can
directly access the voltage controller through the Elmer lab software and set
the voltage to just whatever we want there's no way we killed it yep right
yep it's totally fine yep do you want to hit the power supply yep we got it she
works she has the video title we did not
kill a 390 at this point in time with full control over GPU how much can we
improve performance well uh with an air cooler the results were worse than
Baseline the card was drawing 600 watts and the cooler just could not keep up so
we needed some assistance who better help with hardcore overclocking Than The
Man Behind actually hardcore overclocking himself buildo I you're
basically not going to get much past the stock voltage settings of these cards
cuz they just run insanely hot so if you keep raising the voltage the internal
temperatures rise faster then you gain stability from extra voltage we have a
couple of options the one that you might be thinking we would use is the chill
tastrophe that's right here the problem
is is that the phase change block that I
made doesn't seem to work as good as we
hoped and needs a little bit of a redesign instead and I'm really sad to
say this we're going to have to use this yeah I I don't even know what to
describe it as other than just like a complete piece of um we we made a video
about making this Chiller nicer and in the process of making it nicer it just
got so much worse it's in a box and it's hard to see what's leaking and if it's
leaking on domain's voltage or whatever hopefully it works I don't know
hopefully make everything work a bit better I grabbed a bunch of spray foam
and the plan is to basically just just cover the whole thing in it
hopefully that'll stop some of the condensation issues internally oh and
also it is super heavy because I made it out of welded steel so I could get our
welder set up for doing the pyramid PC the back half of yesterday was super
productive all the electronics have been moved out and zip tied slga taped to the
outside so that water will not drip on them hopefully all of the shunts have
also been modded you can see right here that there's another resistor on top of
all of them it was just as painful as before given our soldering iron finally
we need to water cool this bad boy water blocks for it do exist but I would be
concerned about condensation that I wouldn't be able to see forming on the
inside so instead we're just going to use a generic VGA cooler which means
unfortunately we need to modify the VGA
cooler the problem is that the design of its really stupid so if you look in here
the dimension of the steel piece is what gets you your clamping force on this
o-ring super critical for this o-ring working and you not getting water all
over your GPU that unfortunately means
that I'm going to have to make something completely different we're going to hack
something up with an angle grinder and call it a a
goodbye our CPU mounting plate is done
cuz I like you guys I even polished this side I just have to remove a bunch of K5
so we can install these cute little heat sinks that are going to be going on the
memory modules they will hopefully keep them nice and cool for thermal paste
we're going to be using thermal Grizzly cryon knut we don't have heat spreader
so if there's a spot that's not covered it might get hot and die last thing to
do before this goes back together hopefully some nice cheap
insurance I'm sorry it's so I don't kill
it I know but like why this poor GPU it didn't deserve any
of
this I really hope I don't kill this card I know I've said that a lot but
like I want to do more hardcore overclocking Chiller just ate 16 L of
water if this thing doesn't leak I will be so happy that'll take half a while to
cool down but oh there we go so far so
good is the air conditioner working oh
it is the real question is the pump holy
crap it just worked we have water coming out of here is this leaking I don't see
any leaks here oh that's definitely leaking what's that looks like your
freay foam didn't do its job so I think
what's leaking is right here oh that's gross I need gloves for this this has to
be what's leaking oh my God that's gross oh this got out of hands some
fast where is the drain Port I know that
I included one this is a mess Brandon you're not
wrong there I believe there was a drain
port on the bottom somewhere yeah let's get bucket in
there of all the ways that this was going to go horribly wrong this is not
the way that I expected it to happen I'm sorry viewers that you need to watch
this oh a where's the drain Port okay I
see
it everything's fine I have a lot of
water down my sleeves gpus going onto the test bench
blocks fine gpus is not leaking that's
all great water temperatures at 14°
which is awesome it's subambient but not so cold that we're going to have
condensation issues guess it's time that we boot her
up you already know this but don't do anything that we've done in this video
at home it's all a bad idea like I've
done some pretty Jank stuff before but this is primo
Jank yes GPU is not dead so GPU
temperature is currently at 11° you're not getting condensation but you are
getting nice and cold all of our powers look good do we have vrm temperatures on
here everything right here seems to be working pretty well as long as you just
don't look back past it it's boosting
High memory is getting kind of hot but
it still is doing just fine so vrm
temperature in the last run 54° GPU temperature 33 freaking awesome
memory is getting a little bit hot we saw 96° we can probably cool this down a
bit better on that last run we drew 360
watt which is half of what we actually Drew which means we did what 720 w
and the GPU is at 2 GHz this thing is
freaking fast it's finally time to do some overclocking so I think we're going
to be pretty easily able to get around 21 2200 MHz on this GPU although that
doesn't really matter Invidia does This Thing Called clock stretching so if the
core voltage drops a little bit to keep
the GPU stable they will for a couple of Cycles drop the frequency down and just
not report it in software at all so even though we might be looking at 2200 MHz
or whatever the thing that really is going to tell us if it's good or not is
the 3D Mark score now for those scores our Baseline was 10,000 if we can get
11,000 I'm going to be happy and if we
can get 12,000 were like top 10 in the
world with this GPU that's we we're can do it here's our first overclocked run
so this is plus 50 MHz on the core and
our plan is to basically just add 25 MHz
see if it's stable if it crashes we add some more voltage we just keep on going
like that until either the thermals or the vrms or something just can't take it
anymore go away Brandon I'm going to overclock this for the next while and
see if we can get a record okay 10,900 I think that's slightly more than we had
Baseline actually that's deadly close to 11,000 so we're just going to keep on
going let's see how far we can push it so CPU it's at 5.5 GHz and uh I had to
open the door back there so that it wouldn't keep on thermal throttling on
us anyway GPU isn't quite as fast as I
wanted we are getting like
11,500 for our scores sometimes
11,700 that is a 12% increase over stock
and stock was already 6% faster than stock so like this is a lot faster than
a normal 390 problem is that doesn't get
us onto the 3D Mark leaderboard I think it's just simply a case of silicon
Lottery like no matter what I do can't get more than plus 100 MHz on the core
so was all of this worth it I guess it
depends on what you're trying to do for a 12% performance increase like that is
measurable but at the same time you're risking a card that's infinite dollars
cuz you can't buy one yeah there we go
11,706 so that is obscenely fast our
poor stupid Chiller can barely keep up with our 39 it's outputting so much
power I don't think we're going to be able to get better than that that said I
had fun uh is that a good constellation prize Brandon my leak bin filled up so I
put a leak bin underneath my leak bin gu I thought going into this that this was
going to be super simple just you know Chuck some resistors onto the board and
bippity B you have a super fast 390
turns out it's not that easy there's no good reason to do this besides you have
fun making your scores get nice and high
what's also a lot of fun is uh C Sonic they sponsor this video and I'm honestly
shocked that I was able to use a single power supply I brought two of them over
here thinking that I have to run both of them because uh CPU is drawing 400 watts
cards drawing a pretty consistent 800 that's like 12200 WTS I kind of thought
it was going to conch out and it didn't so excellent job C Sonic this is a real
stress test of your power supply in you passed they also have a 12-year warranty
I run it in my system at home and
they're just high quality power supplies what else more do you want so if you
like this video hit like get subscribed do you want to see more hardcore
overclocking stuff I kind of want to 6.9 GHz CPU I wouldn't mind doing that and
if you want to watch something else maybe watch when uh when we sub zeroed
the Alienware area 51m that was ridiculous h